18th March 2011 Archive

Attackers breached the servers of RSA and stole information that could be used to compromise the security of two-factor authentication tokens used by 40 million employees to access sensitive corporate and government networks, the company said late Thursday.

The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has run simulations that show how the tsunami triggered by last Friday's 9.0 Miyagi earthquake in northeastern Japan propagated across the Pacific Ocean.

In the months following the launch of its new mid-range DSLR at Photokina, Nikon struggled to keep up with demand, so successful and fabled the D7000 had quickly become. But does it really live up to the hype?

There was a time when having to use anything but a Nokia phone would evoke fears of disorientation and a general unease about straying from my comfort zone. Sony Ericsson? Where is everything? Motorola? Does it do iSync? Samsung? Er... Even though Nokia never actually overwhelmed Mac users with its support for the platform, if you picked the right phone, then Apple’s iSync could be used on a number of handsets to synchronise address book and calendar data.

Many organisations will assume that a virtualised desktop is best delivered on a thin client device. However there’s a good case for reusing existing PCs, and not all thin clients are created equal. How should you determine the best client device for your desktop virtualisation solution?

Sweden is to delay the implementation of the controversial EU data retention directive for a year, risking a heavy fine of up to €68m, whereas Austria has decided to implement the directive after a European Court of Justice ruling in 2010.

Hurrah! Research company ABI has predicted a boom in paid-for streaming music services benefitting a long list of winners. There's just a few groups in the loser column... including the artists who make the music.

The "cloud" is still somewhat in its novelty phase as with virtualisation and (say) XML of yesteryear, when simply waving them at an application would magically make all your troubles drop away, like sessions on a crashing web server.

The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan, badly damaged during the extremely severe earthquake and tsunami there a week ago, continues to stabilise. It is becoming more probable by the day that public health consequences will be zero and radiation health effects among workers at the site will be so minor as to be hard to measure. Nuclear experts are beginning to condemn the international hysteria which has followed the incident in increasingly blunt terms.

Google's contribution to the review of the intellectual property created to please Google was always going to be an important document. And here it is, typos and all; what a shame Google didn't review it on the way out of the door - some parts are unreadable.

THQ has made it abundantly clear that it intends to step it up as a publisher, marquee titles – the likes of De Blob 2, Red Faction: Armageddon and indeed Homefront are all part of that plan – as the publishing house looks to take on Activision and EA, specialists in the art of the cross-platform blockbuster.

Actress Vanessa Hudgens has met with federal investigators who are probing a reported hack of her personal Gmail account. The hack led to the online distribution of nude photos and videos of the High School Musical star.

AT&T is clamping down on subscribers who have jailbroken their iOS devices or rooted their Android handsets in order to tether their computers or tablets to the intertubes without paying for that service.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a lawsuit against IBM, alleging that the company paid bribes to government officials in China and South Korea to secure deals for the sale of mainframe and PCs among different government agencies.

Dell director of storage strategy Carter George has confirmed that the company will offer at least two "public clouds" – one based on Microsoft's Azure platform and another based on, well, something else.

In early December, researchers from security firm Radware were dispatched to repel attacks against a company being targeted by the Anonymous hacking collective and could only be described as fierce and potentially devastating.

Google has already released an update for its Chrome browser that fixes a critical vulnerability in Adobe's Flash Player that's under attack. Users of the animation software on other browsers and operating systems will have to wait until next week for the same patch.